A Birthday Vigil

My birthday is over
My special day
Passed
Signed off
And filed in a drawer
With the others

As the years pass
My cabinet is getting more full
Watching fireworks at Disneyland
A surprise party at my parents house
A concert I performed in Chicago
The song my wife wrote and sang to me in the mountains

Each one a special kind of special
Completely different
With one thing in common

A reluctance to let it go

I don’t make a big deal of birthdays
But I take the time
To do what I want
And step away
For me, a birthday is freedom

A crack in the sidewalk
Noticed as I pass by
To remind me the distance I’ve covered
And how far I still have to go
Hopefully

But If every day was my birthday
I’d never get anything done
I’d get bored
So I’d start doing some stuff
And then some more
Eventually, my life would look a lot like it does today

I understand that this is natural
I learned a lot time ago
Not to fight nature
It’a a better collaborator
Than an adversary
You can reroute a river by digging a trench
But to stop it completely requires a dam
And even then
Water pools up
You have to do something with it
Or the dam breaks

This is how our lives work
And I got out of the dam building business years ago
These days I dig trenches

So today I woke up
And did what I know how to do
I grabbed my shovel and started digging